(WWAV) was just an idea, thought up by eight Black women on a front porch in Central City New Orleans. From their various health and human services posts across the city, WWAV’s foremothers saw how HIV/AIDS was devastating the Black community. They also saw that not one of the city’s agencies had made the health and wellbeing of Black people a service priority. If their community was going to have
access to health promotion tools, the WWAV foremothers knew it was up to them. And so they continued to meet at dusk, after long days of work, to make harm reduction and wellness packets. Into the late hours, they walked the streets of the neighborhoods in which they were raised, talking with those who had at best been forgotten and at worst had been left to die. In this intimate space, they brought people into relationships and into care. They turned neighborhood bars into underground needle exchanges; they brought hope to people who had too little. In so doing, they pioneered a model of community-driven outreach that continues to guide public health research today. We launch Front Porch Research Strategy in honor of the long legacy of southern women building community, speaking truths, and crafting analysis in the interstices between street and home, between public and private. Our community-based participatory research institute has been incubated and launched under the co-leadership of Deon Haywood, Executive Director of Women With A Vision, Inc., and Dr. Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Our founding research team includes:
Shaquita Borden is a Ph.D. Candidate in Health Education and Health Promotion at University of Alabama at Birmingham. She comes to her doctoral studies through ten years of community-based health work with women and LGBTQ communities in the South, and currently serves as Women With A Vision’s Director of Research and Evaluation. Born and raised in New Orleans, Shaquita is passionate about working to improve the health of the city’s residents using a participatory approach to understand the structural drivers of women’s health disparities. from Louisiana State University’s School of Public Health and her B.A. Dillard University. In 2013, Shaquita was awarded the Billy R. Cox Endowed Scholarship in recognition of her work on public health issues for the gay, le***an, bi and trans-gender populations. Melinda Chateauvert, Ph.D., is a writer, historian and activist with three decades of experience in movements for gender equality, s*xual freedom and civil rights advocacy. Working with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Dr. Chateauvert has served as an expert witness in class action litigation challenging race discrimination in higher education and public contracting, as well as documenting racial bias in death penalty cases. Her 1997 monograph documenting the work of African American women in organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first international black trade union in the AFL-CIO, remains the standard for labor historians. Her recent book, S*x Workers Unite: A history of the movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk, traces the vital activism of s*x workers at the fringes of gay liberation, AIDS activism, labor organizing and the long struggle against police violence and criminalization. Laura McTighe is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. Her dissertation project, “This Day, We Use Our Energy for Revolution," is a collaborative ethnography of activist persistence, researched and written alongside southern black women organizers amid the social change they are affecting in New Orleans today. Prior to her doctoral studies, Laura spent almost twenty years challenging criminalization and creating transformative communities of support for people affected by the U.S. prison system. She is the co-founder of the Institute for Community Justice, and currently organizes Religion and Incarceration. Her writing is included in Beyond Walls and Cages: Bridging Immigrant Justice and Anti-Prison Organizing in the United States (2012), the International Journal for Law and Psychiatry (2011), Islam and AIDS: Between Scorn, Pity and Justice (2009), and many community justice publications. We are also joined by:
Ashley Bernal is a Ph.D. student in Public and Urban Policy at The New School’s Milano School of International Affairs. Her research interests include various ways middle-class black women experience citizenship by examining the disparity of impact of socio-structural policies in various institutions. Prior to her doctoral studies, Ashley served as the Gender-based Violence Program Coordinator for Women with a Vision, LLC, where she created a culturally specific program to better service African-American and LBTQ domestic violence, s*xual assault, dating violence, and stalking survivors of the greater New Orleans metropolitan area. Currently, she is an Adjunct Professor at the City University of New York’s York College, teaching courses in the Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, the Sociology of Gender, and Social Stratification. Ultimately, Ashley plans to utilize her research to provide data-driven policy recommendations to positively impact the social, economic, and political representation of black women.
